One of our players has created a really nifty race that we decided to write into the world of Cyrus through the Player Picture Project. The concept behind it seemed too spooky not to release at Halloween, so here you go, a freebie from Silvervine – The Animated Objects race. You can download a PDF at Drive Thru RPG.

Animated Object

Race created by Tim Hornikel

Art by Avery Liell-Kok

Attributes: +1 Perception, +1 Strength, +2 Toughness,
Starting HP: 6 x Toughness
Movement Rating: Average (40 feet)
Racial Affinity Focuses (½ cost) :
Non Organic (NO BREATHE, NO FOOD, NO SLEEP, NO HERB) (Free)
Levitation (Free)
Telepathic Communicator*
Racial Language: Archaic Elven, Any one language of the race they came from.*

* An Animated Object can not communicate with other races if they have not purchased Telepathic Communicator. They can think and move, but not make their thoughts known.

Despite already wielding phenomenal magical power, the Godelves of Cyrus had always been fascinated with ways to increase their ability to wage war and subjugate the world. To that end they carried out many profane experiments. One of those experiments resulted in the creation of weapons and objects animated by the souls of murdered slaves.

The goal of these experiments was to create weapons that could fight without a bearer. If the bearer died in battle, the weapon would continue fighting unencumbered by restraints of mortal flesh. The Godelves were only semi-successful. They did indeed create weapons capable of fighting without wielders, but the weapons were not wholly controllable and they retained some personality of the creature they were created from.

The Godelves shelved the idea, literally. They contained the Animated Objects up in boxes that would contain their magic  and make them inert. These boxes were scattered amongst the Godelven empire to be used as last resort defenses in case of slave revolt. Most were forgotten in the mists of time, but many have been released and live out interesting lives in the hands of adventurers, rascals, and kings. Some decry being wielded by lesser beings and choose to carve their own path from the world.

All Animated Objects, as they have come to be known, have a few things in common. They always contain some amount of metal in their construction. They never take the shape of anything bipedal or animal, always being a created object of some sort. No Animated Object retains the memories of the individual which they were created from, but the memories do exist within special rune covered metal cubes which are separated from the objects during the creation process. Some examples of animated objects which have been found are swords, lyres, arrows, mirrors, and other weapons and household objects.

When an Animated Object was created, the soul of a being was extracted at the moment of death and implanted into a specially prepared magical metal. This metal was then forged into the desired shape by a Dwarven slave. Part of the metal was separated from the object and turned into a rune covered cube which would retain and constrain the memories and personality of the being which was used to power the object. The soul would reside within the object itself, developing a new trainable personality. The experiences that an object had then would get transferred to the storage cube, no matter how far away or hidden it was. Though the Animated Object only had access to the new memories and personality it made, it was found that they would feel attachment to certain races, most likely the one that they were created from. Likely, this is some bleed through of the old memories and personality.

Conventional damage and magical spells can harm and incapacitate an Animated Object, but it is hard to truly kill one. There are rumors of a few ways to do so The first is to destroy the storage cube, which will release the soul within the object and leave the object inert. The second way is to cast an object into a fire hot enough to completely destroy the metal. The third way to destroy an Animated Object is by having them absorb the memories of a cube that is not theirs. This will short out the cube and release the soul.

One of the biggest sticking points for completing the Silvervine Core Rulebook has been finishing the writing on the world of Cyrus. Cyrus was the reason that Silvervine got started in the first place, and it has always been Matt’s baby. Since I was tasked with writing it up as an RPG game world instead of a world that was the backdrop to his in-progress novel, I’ve always had an odd relationship with it.

On one hand, Matt isn’t your typical gamer and had lots of unique ideas for the world. Back in those days I hadn’t been exposed to a lot of the non D&D games that I’ve come to love today. Things that matt proposed for the world I always had a hard time integrating into my idea of what tabletop gaming was.  The more I did though, the more I came to embrace many of the more unique points of Cyrus.

On the other hand, Matt isn’t your typical gamer and never had as much exposure to what kinds of things have become cliche’ in games. A lot of elements that could be found within the World of Cyrus were cases of parallel development to concepts found in many other fantasy settings. I’d shake my hand at the heavens every time I would mention the latest thing to come out of a brainstorming session and one of my friends would tell me about how that was like a tribe of werewolves in White-wolf, or how a group of Elves in forgotten realms had similar qualities to a tribe of Elves in Cyrus.

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